


Some Things Never Change

by teruhana



Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Gen, planeswarden headcanons, poor ringabel has so much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 18:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10519239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teruhana/pseuds/teruhana
Summary: Ringabel felt like he was dying.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i enjoy projecting my misery onto this boy so have fun with this gross vent piece lol

Planeswardens rarely slept, simply because they hadn't the time. Their brief hours of respite were sacred. Even the grim nightmares that often came to them in the whispers of night were so desperately desired since at least they weren't awake. Ringabel had learned very quickly that it was not a life for the faint of heart. He knew that then, and he knew that now.

Ringabel felt like he was dying. Again.

He couldn't sleep anymore. He lay in cots, or in bedrolls, and he found himself lost in his own mind, swimming in an ocean of his own memories. He lost track of his time as a Planeswarden early on. How long had it been since he had last seen his friends? Weeks, perhaps, or years. With every plane of existence and every world, he felt them slipping away from him.

The first group were merely slivers of memories, ones that had been clawed at and smudged until they were only a few streaks of names and faces and voices. Agnès, Tiz, Edea. And Airy. Airy, Airy, Airy. Ringabel once saw a butterfly take flight suddenly and fly across his path. By then, he and the other Planeswardens had fought against nightmarish creatures from the pits of hell and men who thought themselves gods, but nothing quite struck fear into his heart like when he thought he saw a flash of white hair and a sickening grin among those wings. Sometimes, Ringabel didn't know whether he hated her or should thank her. She had ruined his life, his first one.

When Ringabel let his guard down, he could remember the anger and hurt in Edea's eyes as they fought in his first life. As Ringabel had almost died. The memory was a worse blow than any one he had faced in physical combat.

A comrade of his pointed out, off-hand, that Ringabel was becoming more serious. More stern, more...  _Alternis_ , a voice at the back of his mind had called.  _More like Alternis was. Is. You're still the same person._ Ringabel then made it a point to laugh more.

His reflection became more familiar to him and it made him feel ill. Away from his friends, he realized that he had begun to slip into old and foreign habits. The thought felt like bile left in the corners of his mouth. Alternis, Ringabel. Ringabel, Alternis. What separated one from the other? Ringabel felt hollow. Was he the Ringabel personality, a man who had made the most of his fresh start? Or was he the Alternis personality, a man who lied and wore the mask of a dandy to hide that fact that he would never be able to change? Memories or not, Ringabel reckoned, people were who they were. When his first life had returned to his mind in flashes of painful color, had he started to revert back to his original ways?

He felt like vomiting. He wanted to vomit up those memories, those thoughts, with it.

When he lay wake at night, however, it was Edea he thought of. Edea, the girl he grew up with. Edea, the girl he would die for. Edea, who loved Ringabel but refused to admit it. Hyperbole would be an understatement to the intensity of emotions that the thought Edea brought him. Love, yes, but sadness and an ache that wracked his body that he couldn't find a suitable name for. He wanted nothing more than to laugh with her, to tease her, to smile in the face of her anger. The pads of his finger itched to caress her face. The softness of her skin was a ghost that danced its way across his palms. Desire and longing were heavy weights on Ringabel's bones. Not in some lecherous, defiling way, but an honest expression of love and loss and desperation.

Ringabel supposed that, wherever she was, she thought of him. He chastised himself for that. What sort of gentleman broke a lady's heart?

He had left for a reason: to find his original world, the one with his original life as the original Alternis. With the original Edea. But he knew, deep down, that it would be a fruitless endeavor. He was Alternis, perhaps, but an Alternis scarred by a different world and had lived a different life. He belonged in that first world as much as he belonged in the second, or the third. He was an anomaly: two lives and two memories crammed into a single body. He didn't belong anywhere.

 

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in an hour  
> and they say depression saps motivation


End file.
